Overview
Overview

Thank you for choosing ASUS products. You are acquainted that ASUS provides not only quality hardware, but also excellent management software tool that allows you to fully control your ASUS products. You may or may not hear or use the earlier version of this software before. Now it is a great opportunity to give it a try. We believe that you will soon find how powerful it will be for your daily management jobs. This software is called ASUS Web-based Management (ASWM) and it is version 2.0 at the present. We will refer it to "ASWM" in the rest of the document.

If you do not yet know what ASWM really can do for you, here we give you a brief explanation about what it is and how it helps. ASWM is composite of an agent and a set of HTTP web pages. The agent is the mandatory of ASWM that comes with some hardware dependant and independent device drivers plus some application programs. The set of HTTP web pages is the only interface, which lets you to manage the agent.

The agent basically provides the ability to monitor the hardware status of your ASUS product. For example, it watches the fan's rotating speeds, the working voltages of the system, the motherboard's or CPU's temperatures, and even the health status of your server's backplanes (backplane is optional and it does not exist on all models). You could consider all these monitoring items are "sensors". Different sensor has different threshold values for different conditions. Besides, it also observes those of non-hardware usages such as hard drive's S.M.A.R.T., space utilization of a file system, CPU's or memory's loading, and even traffic amount of a network device.

Meanwhile, ASWM is not only passively monitor these sensors, but is also actively notifying to any assigned administrators in variable ways, such as sending e-mails, SNMP traps, short messages, and pager calls. Certainly all these notification would be recorded in OS event logs. The message LED, if your system has one, also reacts these notifications. Additionally, you can define your own activities based on the different kind of occasions. For instance, you can assign to shutdown the system whenever the CPU is overheated or execute a specific software application while somebody is opening the system's chassis (detecting of chassis intrusion is optional and it does not exist on all models).

By the way, you can configure a few of hardware options that BIOS cannot show to you such as "ASR timer" (will be explained later), "fan speed grades" and so on. On an ASUS server that has Windows family installed, you even can flash the system's BIOS by ASWM.

As you could see on the Support CD, ASWM agent supports both on Microsoft Windows platform (including Windows 2000 series, Windows XP series and Windows Server 2003 series) and Red Hat Linux platform (including Red Hat 8.0 and Red Hat 9). You choose the appropriate package depending on your primary OS installation of the server.

You may be surprised that there are so many good features that you can acquire from the agent. But you may ask how to organize these things in a unique and simple way? Remember the HTTP pages we talked earlier? Yes. ASWM supports the fully compatible web pages to assist you to do the right configuration job. First of all, it requires you to install Microsoft Internet Information Server 5.0 (IIS 5) or 6.0 (IIS .NET) when you install ASWM. The installation program will wisely setup your IIS and prepare ready-to-go TCP/IP ports for remote HTTP connections. All you have to do is to open your HTTP browser locally or remotely, and then access the server's TCP/IP port 2623 by HTTP protocol, or port 2624 by HTTPS protocol (SSL, Secured Socket Layer). On Red Hat Linux, all you have to do is to install the most popular Apache HTTP Server 2.0 and OpenSSL. All HTTPD configuration of ASWM will be installed separately from your existing web host configuration. We provide the RPM package for your easiest way to install and uninstall ASWM. To customize a minimum working environment, there is a shell script to ease the complicated task. Experienced ASWM users could attempt to run that script in an advanced mode to gain more precise control of your ASWM settings.

ASWM's web pages are fully compatible with W3C HTML 4.0/DOM standard. Currently, the following HTTP browsers have been tested and work well with ASWM: Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0, 6.0 (SP1), and 5.5 (on Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP Home/Professional, and Windows Server 2003), Mozilla 1.3 and 1.4 (on any of UNIX or Windows platform). However, older versions of Netscape Communicator or Navigator will no longer be supported since they are not full W3C DOM compliant. You will also need Java Virtual Machine if you want to view the real-time chart of all sensor monitoring. On a Windows Server 2003 or a Linux platform, you have to download the JRE package at java.sun.com of Sun Microsystems and install them manually by yourself.

For your convenience, ASWM supports the most popular remote desktop management tool: VNC (Virtual Network Computing). Since it is a GPL-licensed software, we have included the binaries and source-code packages for Windows platform in Support CD. Red Hat users can install related VNC RPMs from their distribution CDs.

Disclaimer

ASUS is not responsible for any damages, including loss of profits, loss of information, interruption of business, personal injury and/or any damage or consequential damage without limitation, incurred before, during or after the use of our products.